Category: World
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Why Egypt Could Fail
I’ve finally had a chance to read Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. It provides a useful tool for looking at the President Morsi’s attempt to centralize power in his own office could damage Egypt’s fragile economy. In Why Nations Fail Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson reiterate throughout that politically inclusive institutions,…
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The Problem with Labour Moblity: Opportunity is not Enough
It is a well known fact that labour mobility is low in the E.U, despite the disparate strength of member countries’ economies. In fact, only 0.2% of EU citizens move to work in another country in any given year. Far lower than the 2% to 2.5% of Americans who change States in any given year.…
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Poverty and the Ease of Doing Business
s usual, I was reading an article in The Economist, when I saw a statement that I so very often see in international development news stories: Ethiopia’s doors are not all swung wide open to foreign investment, but rather opened selectively. The regime of Meles Zanawi, the prime minister, is ideological and authoritarian: the ruling…
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There Is No ‘Competitive Economy’ On/Off Switch
As anticipated by many observers, elections in Greece ended in stalemate as many Greeks elected to support the Coalition of the Radical Left and other anti-austerity parties over that the two traditional parties, New Democracy and PASOK. One of the bailout conditions that the leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left, Alexis Tsipras, refuses to…
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It’s (Rarely) the Government’s Fault
As the U.K. slipped into a technical recession – two quarters of negative GDP growth – the media, industry, and opposition parties were quick to pounce on the U.K. government austerity measures. Either they blamed the U.K. government for the slowdown outright, or suggested that austerity during an economic slump are foolish. The data says…
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Across the Eurozone, Citizens Vote Out Austerity Governments
World stocks continue to oscillate with every bond sale and finance minister utterance in the 17 member Eurozone. Yet, the underlying reality is that the situation hasn’t changed at all. Matthew O’Brien has a nice summary in The Atlantic. It’s tragicomic. Southern Europe already has an unemployment crisis. Their depression-levels of joblessness are a dagger…
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The Canadian Mint Has Unveiled the Blueprint of a Bitcoin Successor
The Bitcoin currency – an online, anonymous currency, ‘mined’ by computing power – was fraught with problems from the start. Bitcoin’s supporters champion that it’s ‘safe from the instability of fractional reserve banking‘. Hardly. Bitcoin has proven to be a volatile currency, with only a tiny market for goods and services, no available deposit insurance,…
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The Great Manufacturing On-shoring
Tim Worstall at Forbes brings up an important point about the recent increases in wages and working conditions in China for major American tech companies. These manufacturers would allow wages and conditions to stagnate to maintain a competitive cost edge over other firms, but the inevitable Chinese labour shortages have increasingly given employees the upper…
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Comparative Earthquake Economics
A recent article by Matt Yglesias on the affect of weather on the economy (or at least, how it is measured) got me thinking about post-disaster economics. What happens to national economies after major natural disasters? Certainly, the loss of life can’t be ignored, but what about the survivors’ livelihoods? The immediate affects are obvious…
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The Mobile Phone’s Rise in Developing Countries
Saying that developing countries ‘leapfrogged’ tradition information communication technology adoption is a massive understatement. Ten years ago, cell phones and traditional landlines were virtually non-existent in low income countries. In 2002, there was less than one cell phone per 100 people in UN least-developed countries compared to 64 cell phones per 100 people in the…
Envelope Economics 
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